


Purple Sky

by anorak188



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, it's so sad in the beginning but the end is happy, post praimfaya sadness, suicidal thoughts but no actual suicide, we still breathing?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:14:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24939637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anorak188/pseuds/anorak188
Summary: You're in an endless desert with a vast purple sky. A hand reaches out for your own. Whose is it?
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 1
Kudos: 38





	Purple Sky

“Bellamy?” She blinks the sand out of her eyes. “That sounded weird to say. I haven’t heard another human voice besides my own inner monologue in almost two months. I haven’t really had the need to listen to my own self speak anyway, but then I found this radio and I finally got it working. Well, the light comes on anyway. Bellamy? Are you there?”

She waits too long to be practical, too long for her heart to wait. It hurts to hear silence. It’s endless. Is there really a point to living if all you do is wander the desert for water, search barren woods for new growth, and sleep? To never hear another human voice, to never look at anyone other than your own dirty face in a mirror, to never touch anyone ever again?

She clicks the radio off, the sadness in her heart expanding, sinking into her stomach and rising into her face, forcing her barrier to break and tears to flow. The last time anyone touched her was when he held her, trying to soothe her broken heart when she realized she’d never got to say goodbye to her mom. Now she never would, not without a miracle. She was the last living human to walk the earth.

Lonely didn’t describe it. She was lonely in the Sky Box. This was desolation. No one would bring her meals, letting outside light peek through the crack in the door. No one would walk her to the showers, letting her get her daily ten minute glimpse of the outside world. No one would pop in and say “Surprise! You’re free! Here’s the people again!”

Her legs hung over the hood of the rover, the weird angle they laid in over the grill making her feet fall asleep. It was almost painful, but at least it was a different sensation. It was real. It was feeling. She hadn’t felt anything but anguish since realizing the last 1200 living people on Earth would be trapped, buried forever unless the seven in space came down with shovels and inhuman strength.

She presses the button. If she doesn’t at least try to hang on, the seven in space will come home to nothing. To no one. Do they even know she’s still alive? Her lips, cracked with dehydration and her tongue as dry as sandpaper, every taste bud grating against the roof of her mouth, barely form the words, but she has to say them. Maybe they can hear her and they just can’t respond. Maybe she’s the one who needs to hear it. “I’m alive.” She ponders the thought. Is she really alive? “But I don’t want to be,” she adds as an afterthought, though it is no afterthought at all, it’s all she can think of.

The gun glints in the fading sunlight. The moon is rising behind her. The air has gone hazy purple. This isn’t so bad. She didn’t eat today, but she did drink the juice from a cactus, even if it was only two swallows, and it was strangely sweet. It was nice. Today was nice. Shouldn’t your last day alive be nice?

“Please come home,” she whispers. “Please tell me you’re coming home. I can wait, I just – I need to know you’re coming home.”

Why don’t they answer her? Don’t they care about her? After all she’s done, doesn’t she matter to them? She saved them over and over again. She took on their problems for them, the trauma, to spare them the pain. Her life has been sheer _pain_ for the last eight months. It vaguely resisters that she’s only eighteen still, but that can’t be right, can it? It feels like she’s lived on Earth for too many horrendous decades.

She doesn’t sleep anymore. She’s tired, sure, she’s dragging, but there’s no point. There’s always someone in her dreams. It’s Raven, shot, bleeding, paralyzed, screaming while Clarke tries to remove the bullet, to save her life and her legs, but it doesn’t work. Clarke’s not a surgeon; she’s never pretended to be. Why does she do it? _Because you love her_ , a voice reminds her.

Harper’s sick. She’s dying of radiation poisoning on a cot in Med Bay, and Clarke searches desperately for potassium iodide. She tears apart boxes and shelves and it always feels like it’s right there, just out of her reach, but it’s never there. It will never be there. Clarke spends so much time looking for the medicine she doesn’t notice Harper’s eyes drift off. They never come back. Monty is screaming at her for her neglect. If only she had done this or that, Harper would still be alive. But it was never neglect; Clarke was trying to save her. Clarke tries to save her every time, even though she knows how the dream ends. Why does she still try? _Because you love her_ , the voice presses.

She handcuffs Murphy to the rocket, because if she doesn’t, he won’t let her test nightblood. Someone has to try it or everyone dies. She understands he doesn’t want it to be Emori, but she can’t think of the name of anyone else in the room. There are bodies in there, but they have no face, save Murphy and Emori. She could choose someone else, a faceless body, but she doesn’t. She never does. It’s always Emori, and it’s always Murphy, threatening to break his own wrists if it means saving her. But she’s not hurting Emori, she’s saving her, and she’s saving her for his sake, because it’s been nearly a decade since he’s had someone love him, and he deserves to be loved, so she has to save her. She has to save them both. But he still screams at her, and she still does it, every single time. The voice is insistent. _Because you love him_.

And then, when she’s tortured herself enough, he’s there. He’s next. She wants to wake herself up, because God, if she has to watch him die, or watch him hate her, or blame her for things beyond her control, her heart will die. But he doesn’t. He never does. Instead he reaches out to her, holding her hand, just like he did when she entered the City of Light. He feels solid. He feels real. She launches herself into his arms, and he’s steady. He feels so real she can feel the rise and fall of his chest, she can smell the scent she can only describe as Bellamy clinging to his hair. She feels the fabric of his soft t-shirt in her fists. Her chin rests in his collarbone and he nuzzles the side of her face with his, and she can feel the stubble on his jaw and the heat of his skin. He’s warm. He’s alive. He’s still breathing. Why is he here, at the end of a horrible series of dreams? Why doesn’t he do her harm? The voice is loud, booming. 

Her hands splay out in front of her, catching her in her fall, grabbing at any piece of metal she can. When her soul returns to her body, she realizes she wasn’t actually falling at all, she had only fallen asleep. She looks over her empty hands, the boy vanished, and the only thing left behind are her torn fingernails and healing radiation burns.

She could’ve sworn she heard his voice. But what did it say? Did it say anything at all, or was it just a feeling, a cadence of his voice?

She curls into herself, her head resting uncomfortably against the windshield, the wipers digging into her shoulders. She twirls the gun absentmindedly against the hood, letting it spin by the trigger guard. She can’t remember if the safety is on. It doesn’t really matter anyway. She can’t survive alone for five years. It’s unreasonable to think anyone could. She should’ve let Bellamy go with her. She could’ve given him the serum when they got back to the lab. He would’ve been sick, being exposed without nightblood, but he would’ve survived right? She was sick, but she survived. At least then she would’ve had someone. At least then they would’ve had time.

Time.

Will he look different when he comes home? Will she look different? He’ll have lived in a confined space with six other people for five years. Will that change him? No. He’ll be fine. He lived in space for twenty-something years and only really associated with his mom and Octavia for most of that time. He’ll be fine. But will she? A year in solitary was hard. But it wasn’t true solitary confinement, she still heard voices through the door. She still saw guards sometimes, or the doctor. This isn’t that. This is complete isolation. This is hell. She’ll be different; she has to be. What if she’s changed beyond his recognition? She already feels like a husk of who she used to be.

Who even did she used to be? She used to be a medical apprentice on the Ark; she was working her way through the ranks to become a doctor, just like her mom. That’s not who she is anymore. Being a doctor down here isn’t anything like it was up there. Up there she gave ice when someone bumped their head, or set a broken bone in a fiberglass cast, or helped with newborn care when a baby was born. Down here she just digs out bullets, repairs knife wounds, and listens to suffering.

She vaguely remembers sneaking out after curfew to go hang out with Wells on the Sky Bridge, looking out at the stars and talking about their day. It was all so trivial. Gossip about who got arrested, theories about which teacher was definitely selling moonshine on the black market, trying to set each other up with people they thought the other would like. Her body may still be in its teenage years but she’s not a teenager anymore. She hasn’t been a teenager since her dad was executed. Her innocence went out the door with him.

Sometimes she would draw. She had scores of files on her data pad of works of hers, and her cell became covered in drawings when that was taken away. Part of her hopes the Sky Box is still up there so he’ll remember her, but no, that was part of Alpha station, and that’s somewhere on Earth with her. Her fingers trail the dust on the metal, carving out the shape of his lips, the bump of his nose, a tendril of hair. It stirs her, realizing she can remember him this way.

She jumps down off the hood, landing in the sand. She gives it a sweep with her arm, clearing the uneven bumps, creating a smooth surface. She takes her time. She has all the time in the world. When her fingertips prove too large to capture his freckles or the scar on his lip, she rummages through the rover for a piece of wire small enough to use as a tool. Getting his hair right is tricky, because it doesn’t always look the same, depending on how it dried or how difficult their day had been. Sometimes it was neat and fell in pretty waves, other times it looked more like full on curls, and other times it was ratty and greasy just like her own, when survival took over. He more often looked like the latter, a mess just like herself, but she won’t draw that. She’ll draw him fresh out of the shower, or, rather what she imagines he looks like fresh out of the shower, given that she’s never seen it or was never at a point to appreciate what it must look like. She bet he would look nice, with smooth hair, water dripping on his forehead because boys never seemed to dry their hair, and he would wear clean clothes and there wouldn’t be an ounce of dirt or blood or gunpowder on him.

She really only intended to draw his face, but she finds herself backing up the rover so she has more space to draw. She adds in a background – a living room, not unlike the one her family grew up with. Of course, had she never been arrested for treason and sent down to the ground, they would’ve likely never even met, much less known each other so well for him to be standing in her family home. But that’s where he belongs. With her mom and her dad – who she’ll draw in later – but he wouldn’t stand there like a brother. No, she wasn’t exactly sure what it was like to have a brother, but she had seen him with Octavia, and she didn’t feel like that. She couldn’t say she felt more, because the bond they had seemed to be powerful, but it was just different. She thought of him differently.

She draws him standing just to the side of the couch, and his expression is, well, like he’s waiting. What is he waiting on? Her hand hovers over the sand. Who is he waiting for?

She’s waiting for him now. Isn’t he waiting for her too?

She backs the rover up once more, and this has officially turned into a mural. She turns on the headlights – when did it get so dark? – and gets back to work.

She draws herself – in scrubs because this is the Ark and healing is beautiful here – mid-motion shutting the door. She’s turned toward him, looking at him, but what’s her expression? How would she look and, more importantly, how would she feel if she were. . . The thought feels too strange to actually think, but her heart is not unfamiliar with the idea, and deep inside she knows it’s all she really wants. How would she feel if she were to come home to him? Is this her family home in this image, or is it more than that? Is it her home with him?

She sits back on her heels for a moment, debating. What is this place? She twiddles the piece of wire between her thumb and forefinger. It’s not like anyone will ever actually see this. No one would make fun of her for drawing it, for indulging herself in fantasies too weak to ever actually happen. Is it weakness to want peace?

She would feel happy. Relieved. She would feel like she could shed overt politeness at the door because he knows her so well. She would kick off her shoes, which were never the right size anyway and always gave her blisters, and she would put her feet up on the coffee table and relax. He would sit down next to her and swat at her feet because his mom would have raised him better than that, she’s sure. And then. . . and then she would put her feet down for his sake, and she would lean into his side, and he would put his arm around her and hold her, and she would tell him about the stress of her day because he understands her. And they would fall asleep on the couch maybe, because he would’ve had a long day too. And the couch is small, so they would have to be close. And they would wake up sometime in the middle of the night, and they would know because the circadian lights would be out, and they would stumble in the dark to go to bed. He would probably stub his toe on something, and she would laugh but not because he’s in pain, no, if he were in real pain she would help, but because it’s such a normal and human thing to do. And they would crawl in bed, still half asleep, and they wouldn’t do anything because that’s an intrusive thought to think, but they would just lay there together, and starlight would shine on his face, and she would wonder how she ever got to be so lucky.

Dust blows up her nose, jolting her out of her daydream. She covers her face with her hand, trying to shield herself from the worst of it. When it becomes clear this is more than wind and is actually a sandstorm, Clarke abandons her work and climbs inside the rover for safety. Sand beats against the window and the force of the wind rattles the vehicle. Right now, her brain is more concerned with the windows holding up, but her heart worries about her drawing outside. When the storm clears, the sun has risen just over the horizon, and she ventures outside to look, but just like the wind and the boy himself, it’s gone.

She looks out at the hazy pink and red sky, darkness vanishing with the morning sun. She had been so consumed with carving him into her lonely world that she forgot to bring her radio in from where it sat on the hood of the rover when the sandstorm hit, and she finds it a few meters away, half buried under sand. She clears it away and flips the switch. The light comes on.

“Bellamy?” She sits down in the sand, the lack of sleep making her tired already, but she’ll sleep later, in the heat of the day. Her decision is final, the idea of such perfection may be unattainable, but she’ll never know unless she tries. Maybe the art supply store is still there, and there are paper and pencils inside. She’ll go there next. If she’s going to do this, she has to be able to capture him, to hang his image on the walls of her house, because she won’t live in the rover forever, she’ll settle down one day when the conditions are right, and he won’t physically be there, he won’t be able to hold her and snuggle her and tell her about his day, but she has the radio, the connection to him, and she’ll have his picture, and that’ll be enough, because she’s still breathing. She still has hope. “I’ll see you soon.”


End file.
